Many standards documents governing the use of public key cryptography include specifications for Authenticated Key Exchange (AKE). AKE protocols involve two parties, an initiator and a responder. The goal of AKE is to allow the two parties to generate a secret session key, while authenticating the identities of the parties, so that the two parties can securely exchange information over a public channel with one another. AKE protocols such as Menezes-Qu-Vanstone (MQV) and an elliptic curve (EC) analogue (ECMQV) have recently been introduced. MQV and ECMQV are based on the well-known Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol. The Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol relies on the hardness of computing the discrete logarithm in a mathematical group. That is, if one takes an arbitrary number g known to everyone, picks an exponent, raises g to the power of this exponent, and announces the result, it becomes computationally infeasible for someone to determine which exponent was used.
Recent research has shown that the KEA, MQV, and ECMQV protocols are not secure against certain classes of attacks such as impersonation attacks.